'Made in the USA: American Masters From the Phillips Collection, 1850-1970' is on display through Aug. 31

When art-loving tourists think of Washington's Phillips Collection, they usually think of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party," the museum's celebrated centerpiece, or its spectacular holdings of post-Impressionist paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne and Edouard Vuillard. But Duncan Phillips, who in 1921 turned his private collection into America's very first museum of modern art, started the Phillips (as everyone now calls it) to show his fellow countrymen that the American art he loved was good enough to stand up to direct comparison to the best work of Europe's then-contemporary...